Searchable Encryption

This book comprehensively reviews searchable encryption, which represents a series of research developments that directly enable search functionality over encrypted data. The book majorly covers: 1) the design and implementation of encrypted search algorithms, data structures, and systems that facilitate various forms of search over always-encrypted databases; 2) different threat models, assumptions, and the related security guarantees, when using searchable encryption in the real-world settings; and 3) latest efforts in building full-fledged encrypted database systems that draw insights from searchable encryption constructions. The book fits in the timely context, where the necessity of safeguarding important and sensitive data has been globally recognized. Traditional security measures, such as storing data behind network firewalls and layers of access control mechanisms to keep attackers out, are no longer sufficient to cope with the expanding landscape of surging cyber threats. There is an urgent call to keep sensitive data always encrypted to protect the data at rest, in transit, and in use. Doing so guarantees data confidentiality for owners, even if the data is out of their hands, e.g., hosted at in-the-cloud databases. The daunting challenge is how to perform computation over encrypted data. As we unfold in this book, searchable encryption, as a specific line of research in this broadly defined area, has received tremendous advancements over the past decades. This book is majorly oriented toward senior undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers, who want to work in the field and need extensive coverage of encrypted database research. It also targets security practitioners who want to make well-informed deployment choices of the latest advancements in searchable encryption for their targeted applications. Hopefully, this book will be beneficial in both regards.

With the advent of the IT revolution, the volume of data produced has increased exponentially and is still showing an upward trend. This data may be abundant and enormous, but it’s a precious resource and should be managed properly. Cloud technology plays an important role in data management. Storing data in the cloud rather than on local storage has many benefits, but apart from these benefits, there are privacy concerns in storing sensitive data over third-party servers. These concerns can be addressed by storing data in an encrypted form; however, while encryption solves the problem of privacy, it engenders other serious issues, including the infeasibility of the fundamental search operation and a reduction in flexibility when sharing data with other users, amongst others. The concept of searchable encryption addresses these issues. This book provides every necessary detail required to develop a secure, searchable encryption scheme using both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic primitives along with the appropriate security models to ensure the minimum security requirements for real-world applications.

This book presents the current state of the literature on the fields of homomorphic and searchable encryption, from both theoretical and practical points of view. Homomorphic and searchable encryption are still relatively novel and rapidly evolving areas and face practical constraints in the contexts of large-scale cloud computing and big data. Both encryption methods can be quantum-resistant if they use the right mathematical techniques. In fact, many fully homomorphic encryption schemes already use quantum-resistant techniques, such as lattices or characteristics of polynomials – which is what motivated the authors to present them in detail. On the one hand, the book highlights the characteristics of each type of encryption, including methods, security elements, security requirements, and the main types of attacks that can occur. On the other, it includes practical cases and addresses aspects like performance, limitations, etc. As cloud computing and big data already represent the future in terms of storing, managing, analyzing, and processing data, these processes need to be made as secure as possible, and homomorphic and searchable encryption hold huge potential to secure both the data involved and the processes through which it passes. This book is intended for graduates, professionals and researchers alike. Homomorphic and searchable encryption involve advanced mathematical techniques; accordingly, readers should have a basic background in number theory, abstract algebra, lattice theory, and polynomial algebra.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Provable Security, ProvSec 2007, held in Wollongong, Australia. The 10 revised full papers presented together with seven short papers were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on Authentication, Asymmetric Encryption, Signature, Protocol and Proving Technique, Authentication and Symmetric Encryption, Signature and Asymmetric Encryption.

The two volume-set, LNCS 8042 and LNCS 8043, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2013, held in Santa Barbara, CA, USA, in August 2013. The 61 revised full papers presented in LNCS 8042 and LNCS 8043 were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Two abstracts of the invited talks are also included in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on lattices and FHE; foundations of hardness; cryptanalysis; MPC - new directions; leakage resilience; symmetric encryption and PRFs; key exchange; multi linear maps; ideal ciphers; implementation-oriented protocols; number-theoretic hardness; MPC - foundations; codes and secret sharing; signatures and authentication; quantum security; new primitives; and functional encryption.

This book gathers papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computing (ICGEC 2019), which was held in Qingdao, China, from 1st to 3rd, November 2019. Since it was established, in 2006, the ICGEC conference series has been devoted to new approaches with a focus on evolutionary computing. Today, it is a forum for the researchers and professionals in all areas of computational intelligence including evolutionary computing, machine learning, soft computing, data mining, multimedia and signal processing, swarm intelligence and security. The book appeals to policymakers, academics, educators, researchers in pedagogy and learning theory, school teachers, and other professionals in the learning industry, and further and continuing education.